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At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic

joinedanthropic.com

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Re: At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic

#131

Post by BobbyJo »

florakel wrote: post #81
dgellow wrote: post #68

Whatever you think of AI for your own work, the fact that the entire economy is betting everything on it is really concerning. It’s not just the fact that it may not work well economically speaking and would end up with a market crash, or all the negative externalities from AI development, it’s also the opportunity cost we are paying. With so much human capital and resources dedicated to developing and running LLMs a…

I prefer that scenario to the one we had before where too many smart people were building out social networks and similar services trying to maximize ad impressions. We are still dealing with the consequences…

1000000% this. I remember lamenting all through the 2010s that all the high paying jobs were basically ad revenue supported.

Now its AI.

Maybe AI doesn't materialize the way we want, but I'll take that bet over business as usual before every time.

Re: At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic

#132

Post by theptip »

dgellow wrote: post #68

Whatever you think of AI for your own work, the fact that the entire economy is betting everything on it is really concerning. It’s not just the fact that it may not work well economically speaking and would end up with a market crash, or all the negative externalities from AI development, it’s also the opportunity cost we are paying. With so much human capital and resources dedicated to developing and running LLMs a…

I don’t really buy the opportunity cost argument. The bets we are placing look EV-positive to me.

The 90th percentile upside is way, way higher than is priced into the current stocks, the 10th percentile looks to me like 2000 where a bunch of investors loose their shirts and then for the next few decades new companies boom on all the infrastructure that was built.

The “failure mode” for this tech is that we don’t advance much beyond Sol/Fable and the existing models just get cheaper. If there is an AI bust in hindsight it likely will look like the dotcom bust did, which is a small blip on the decades-scale GDP curve.

Re: At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic

#133

Post by vanuatu »

nickysielicki wrote: post #45

The question I have is why are these companies hiring these people and what does it say about their hiring practices and the amount of capital they’re poorly spending? It’s exceedingly unlikely that any of the people who were working on YC startups previously have any real professional experience with any of the following: slurm, collectives, NUMA systems, RDMA, compilers, systems programming, general HPC performance…

The top % of YC founders are legitimately quite talented, and high agency/entrepreneurial talent goes a long way in these companies, even if its not in deep infra or research

Re: At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic

#134

Post by vanuatu »

reticulates wrote: post #8

YC has tens of thousands of founders, more are probably at Google and Facebook than Anthropic and OpenAI. I’m not sure a sample of 105 founders shows… anything?

This. the comments here talk as if YC is this secret cabal of upper elites when they're probably one of the least selective good accelerators

Re: At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic

#135

Post by pianopatrick »

ofjcihen wrote: post #121
dgellow wrote: post #68

Whatever you think of AI for your own work, the fact that the entire economy is betting everything on it is really concerning. It’s not just the fact that it may not work well economically speaking and would end up with a market crash, or all the negative externalities from AI development, it’s also the opportunity cost we are paying. With so much human capital and resources dedicated to developing and running LLMs a…

I know Ed Zitron is a dirty word on HN most days but having recently read some of his (highly editorialized) work… it seems like he’s right and the numbers just aren’t making sense. Combine that with the fact that “good enough” is a real thing and cheap Chinese models are either there or close depending on your use case and it’s hard to see how this ends well.

Well it could end well for the general public in the sense that we get cheap, good enough AI.

Re: At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic

#136

Post by deadbabe »

worldthruword wrote: post #83
deadbabe wrote: post #28

IMO we are in the era of “Final Companies” and the appeal of being a founder these days just isn’t great compared to the entrepreneurial boom of the 2010s and 2000s. The risk to reward ratio has never been worse.

If Product-Market fit for small companies take 3-4 years and AI can streamroll you by coming from behind, it makes sense to join the big boys rather than trying to finetune your creation in the hope of making something big.

Yup. Capitalism is a dark forest now. If you try to do anything really interesting, big players will take you out fast and take over the market.

Any business that relies on loudly marketing itself to wide audiences is at risk.

The only viable business path now is niche domains with limited visibility, B2B sales. No social media presence, no website, just quiet business deals being done in exchange for goods or services that is all under the radar of megacorps. In tech this is now virtually impossible as all useful services that could be provided have already been provided in some form by now.

There are no low or mid hanging fruit, everything is now very high up.

Re: At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic

#137

Post by therobots927 »

ofjcihen wrote: post #121
dgellow wrote: post #68

Whatever you think of AI for your own work, the fact that the entire economy is betting everything on it is really concerning. It’s not just the fact that it may not work well economically speaking and would end up with a market crash, or all the negative externalities from AI development, it’s also the opportunity cost we are paying. With so much human capital and resources dedicated to developing and running LLMs a…

I know Ed Zitron is a dirty word on HN most days but having recently read some of his (highly editorialized) work… it seems like he’s right and the numbers just aren’t making sense. Combine that with the fact that “good enough” is a real thing and cheap Chinese models are either there or close depending on your use case and it’s hard to see how this ends well.

Zitron will be proven right. That’s why I’m investing in beaten down SaaS stocks. It’s a reasonable hedge against the AI insanity.

Re: At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic

#138

Post by dieselgate »

cliglot wrote: post #120

I’ve been in a bit of creative/intellectual rut the last few years, but before that there were a handful of things that intrigued me in the last 5-10 years. Most recently, I became interested in the field of photonics/optics, particularly in the field of novel optical communications research. I’ve had mild interests in things like Biology and History since I was a child. The latter particularly hooked me a few years…

Don't forget the study of neuroscience is much larger than just the human brain. Many other target organisms are studied e.g. fruit fly and are much more thoroughly understood on a fundamental level. Respectfully, when people want to understand the human brain they usually intend to study sociology or psychology rather than neuroscience. Although, of course, neuroscience is applicable to human brains as well.

Re: At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic

#139

Post by riazrizvi »

It speaks to me of these fascinating Jungian shadows, where a thing/person has a front claiming to do their thing and in some non-obvious way they facilitate the opposite.

YC mints companies, founders, it disrupts.

Its shadow feeds your disruptive moves into SV's establishment tier, and selectively shuts down efforts, and moves people into its favored buckets of enterprise.

Re: At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic

#140

Post by ofjcihen »

pianopatrick wrote: post #135
ofjcihen wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know Ed Zitron is a dirty word on HN most days but having recently read some of his (highly editorialized) work… it seems like he’s right and the numbers just aren’t making sense. Combine that with the fact that “good enough” is a real thing and cheap Chinese models are either there or close depending on your use case and it’s hard to see how this ends well.

Well it could end well for the general public in the sense that we get cheap, good enough AI.

Oh definitely. Personally, I think it will get to the point where we have local good enough models.

I’m just incredibly confused how these companies and investors don’t see the writing on the wall UNLESS the point is to just extract as much money as possible and not be left holding the bag.

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